Dunno how to put it properly into words but lately I find myself thinking more about that particular innocence of fairy tales, for lack of better word. Where a traveller in the middle of a field comes across an old woman with a scythe who is very clearly Death, but he treats her as any other auntie from the village. Or meeting a strange green-skinned man by the lake and sharing your loaf of bread with him when he asks because even though he's clearly not human, your mother's last words before you left home were to be kind to everyone. Where the old man in the forest rewards you for your help with nothing but a dove feather, and when you accept even such a seemingly useless reward with gratitude, on your way home you learn that it's turned to solid gold. Where supernatural beings never harm a person directly and every action against humans is a test of character, and every supernatural punishment is the result of a person bringing on their own demise through their own actions they could have avoided had they changed their ways. Where the hero wins for no other reason than that they were a good person. I don't have the braincells to describe this better right now but I wish modern fairy tales did this more instead of trying to be fantasy action movies.
"In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness - from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis."
-Rebecca Solnit
Actually they DO, they do tell stories like this. Popular stories even!
But you probably don't watch a lot of hijinks comedy movies.
Movies like The Hangover (2009, 2011, 2013), Harold & Kumar (2004, 2008, 2011), Get Him to the Greek (2010), Eurotrip (2004),Dude, Where's My Car? (2000), Girl's Trip (2017), Joy Ride (2023), Date Night (2010), The Lost City (2022), etc.
A common theme in this is genre of film is people getting inexplicable, seemingly random, almost mystical boons as a reward for good deeds towards people who seemed insignificant in the moment but turned out to wield strange power within the universe of the film, or alternatively, inexplicable, seemingly random, almost mystical punishments for selfish deeds that harmed people who seemed insignificant in the moment but turned out to wield strange power within the universe of the film.
These films tend to take place in a "fantasy world" not in the sense of being supernatural, but in the sense of being a place upon which people project fantasies, such as a tourist destination like Las Vegas or New Orleans, or a special escapist vacation event like a bachelorette party or a road trip.
No, but seriously.
Watch Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008). It is chock full of capricious fae-like (in a functional sense, serving the same narrative role that a fairy would serve in a legend, not an aesthetic sense) archetypes granting the protagonists magical (by which I mean improbable, outsized and absurd) boons in exchange for favors and/or meting out absurd punishments in exchange for perceived slights.
